Breakthrough Chip Technology Lights the Path to Exascale Computing

[Nflight]

I stumbled on this in a renewable energy blog ( They, the blog writers are really off topic speaking about this situation)

IBM - has developed a nanoparticle based both electric and light computer chip. This makes for very quick speeds and very little energy required to make it all work.
http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/33115.wss

So in reality this is renewable energy mindful blog writers excited, anytime we can lower the energy use, its a good thing.

[NeoGen]

This is indeed great news... but we will have to wait a few years until we see some commercial applications of it. And they will be super expensive at first, as usual.

What comes to mind is... seeing that there will be optical components in the chip, side-by-side with electrical, will the term GHz for clock frequency be replaced by some other unit of measurement? I don't think the optical operations will be measured in Hertz...

[Dirk Broer]

will the term GHz for clock frequency be replaced by some other unit of measurement? I don't think the optical operations will be measured in Hertz...
The frequency of visible light is referred to as color, and ranges from 430 trillion Hz, seen as red, to 750 trillion Hz, seen as violet.